“Laudada”, fazendo mestrado e ensinando : uma autoetnografia docente neurodivergente

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the effects of ableism and psychological distress on the constitution of teachers’ professional identity, focusing on the perspective of critical autoethnography. The main objective is to understand how personal narratives, shaped by ableist interpellations and experiences of exclusion, can be re-signified as methodological and political tools in the production of knowledge within Applied Linguistics. Specifically, it aims to problematize the role of universities and schools in reproducing stigma, highlight the tensions between medical diagnosis and institutional recognition, and propose self-writing as a gesture of resistance. The theoretical framework is grounded in authors such as Foucault, Butler, Hall, hooks, Moita Lopes, and Garland-Thomson, who discuss identity, power, performativity, and disability. The methodological approach is anchored in autoethnography, emphasizing embodied and situated narratives that consider the researcher’s experience as legitimate data and as a criterion for analysis. The findings indicate that professional identity, far from being a stable essence, is traversed by ableist discourses that tend to reduce neurodivergent teachers to diagnostic labels. At the same time, autoethnographic writing makes it possible to reinscribe the diagnosis as a critical category and to construct more humane and engaged pedagogical practices. It is concluded that autoethnography, by articulating personal experience with critical theoretical perspectives, constitutes a counter-archive that inscribes historically silenced voices into the academic field.